Art. 3. THE ISOLATION OF THEOLOGY. 1. The Communion of the Christian with God. By W. Herrmann. 2nd English Edition. London: Williams and Norgate, 1906. 2. The Philosophy of Religion. By H. Höffding. London: Macmillan, 1906. 3. Identité et Réalité. By E. Meyerson. Paris: Alcan, 1908. 4. La Valeur de la Science. By H. Poincaré. Paris: Flammarion, 1909. 5. Science et Religion. By Émile Boutroux. Paris : Flammarion, 1908. English Translation, by J. Nield. London: Duckworth, 1909. FOR nearly a century theology has perforce been enlarging her borders. I am about to contend that she now finds insufficiently comprehensive any narrower scope than that which it was her glory to claim in the days of the great Alexandrines, or, again, in the golden period of the Scholastic age. Theology must henceforth be competent to appreciate and to assimilate the knowledge ever being acquired in fields such as science and philosophy; for many questions raised and answered there, as she well knows, have as profound an influence on theological development as the results of critical and historical research. She needs this competency, if she would gain the Greek as well as the barbarian, for missionary activity; especially in England, where, since natural science is taught with deplorable neglect of the elements of logic and philosophy involved in its structure and revealing its limitations, some students thereof are all too easily beguiled into an agnostic or naturalistic attitude. She needs it too for self-interpretation; and must long for the day when psychology and the science of knowledge shall have enabled her to evaluate mystical intuition, or to take a further step in elucidating the hitherto almost impenetrable mystery which gathers round the union of the two natures of our Lord and the conditions of His knowledge as man. She needs it alike, whether she would seek to isolate religious faith from contact with the several spheres of natural knowledge, or whether she would boldly proclaim, while working and waiting for its realisation, the catholic ideal of the unity of all truth. Alike, I say; for those of her own house who have been urging upon theology the careful policy of isolation necessarily defend their position with weapons borrowed from the armoury of philosophy; just as those of us who deem such retrenchment a timid and disastrous mode of succouring faith in distress derive from the same source the more fundamental grounds on which we base our convictions and our larger hope. The tendency to divorce theology from metaphysic, to ground religious belief exclusively upon individual feeling or the judgments of the practical reason, and consequently to dissolve its relations with the historical and natural sciences, save psychology alone, constitutes a prominent movement in recent theological thought. This movement, to which I would now invite attention, undoubtedly arose as a reaction from overweening intellectualism. Moreover it is, in its main features, so closely analagous to a wave of thought which swept theology once before, that in describing its growth I would venture in few words to trace a parallel. If Scholasticism may be said to have begun with Erigena, it entered upon its course of development with a calm confidence in the unity of all truth, the identity of theology and philosophy, of faith and reason. 'True philosophy is true religion,' the first Schoolman maintained, and true religion is true philosophy.' Nearly three centuries later this intellectualism was wholeheartedly embraced by Abelard, who, reversing Erigena's equation, sought to reduce theology to the level of philosophy. But before the rationalistic tendency of Scholasticism had thus reached its height, the identity assumed by Erigena had already appeared less obvious to so typical a Schoolman as St Anselm. St Anselm taught that reason could justify the assertions of Christian faith, and so lead faith on to knowledge; but he recognised that the two are distinct, and that logic is needed to bridge the chasm between their respective spheres. Another century elapses, and the logic which Anselm had thought sufficient is found to be inadequate. It breaks down when called upon to demonstrate the more mysterious doctrines of the Church. In the age of the Vol. 217.-No. 433. 2 B Summists the hope of theoretically proving such dogmas was abandoned. There were truths, Aquinas acknowledged, 'above reason,' though not contrary to reason; and, somewhat in the spirit of Kant, St Thomas sought to make room for these by narrowing the domain of knowledge. He who tries to prove by natural reason the Trinity of Persons and the Incarnation,' he says, 'detracts from the rights of faith.' Henceforward the decline of scholastic intellectualism was rapid. Duns Scotus, who would nowadays be called a voluntarist, maintained the supremacy of will over intellect, upheld the practical nature of religion, and insisted on its independence of reason and philosophy. Soon the rational demonstrability of the Being of God-a tenet held to the last by Aquinas-was surrendered by William of Occam; and he, as the radical empiricist of his day, resigned all knowledge transcending experience to the sphere of faith. Finally, along with other representatives of Scholasticism in its decline, Occam accepted the doctrine, or rather the fiction, of the double truth.' Not only were reason and faith, philosophy and theology, utterly distinct; what is false in the one might be true in the other! Such was the conclusion of an age-long movement of thought with regard to its central problem of the rationality of faith. For some twenty generations Scholasticism travailed to bring her answer to the birth; and when almost dying she was delivered of the still-born and monstrous doctrine of the double truth.' But from the dawn of Greek philosophy to the last century, belief that the world is speculatively comprehensible by the human intellect has never long been absent from the motives to philosophical endeavour. Reason has shown herself generally unwilling to accept Bacon's eirenicon and to render unto faith the things that are faith's.' She has sometimes treated the facts and doctrines of Christianity as symbol and parable, the real significance of which only appears when she has rationalised them, or assigned them a place in her all-embracing system of theoretic knowledge. She has even retorted against Faith Faith's own authoritative word to her: 'Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.' And never has this spirit waxed more bold, never, at least, since the Christian intellectualism of Abelard and Raymond Lull, have the hopes of speculative thought mounted so high, as during the development of the German idealism in which the constructive side of the Kantian philosophy attained its consummation. Hegel's system, in which this idealistic movement culminated, assigned, in its dialectically outlined evolution of the Absolute, a place to religion, in such wise that its whole essence and meaning were theoretically determined. Religion sheltered no mystery that thought could not disclose: for religion was declared to be absolute knowledge.' Thus the first systematic 'philosophy of religion' to be given to the world reproduced the confident intellectualism of the first rationalisation of Catholic dogma. We have now to observe how closely the recoil from Hegel's position parallels the movement, in medieval thought, away from the corresponding standpoint of Erigena. The first stage in the descent to 'the new philosophy,' somewhat prevalent among theologians to-day, was represented by Lotze, who denied the adequacy of thought alone to comprehend the whole of reality. Lotze believed metaphysic capable of furnishing a theistic conception of the world. So far could theoretic thought advance towards religion; but no farther. For the rest, he held that the practical consideration of 'worth' is required to effect the transition from philosophy to theology. But just as the standpoint reached by the Summists in the thirteenth century afforded no abidingplace for the restless age which followed, so the corresponding position of the almost Christian Lotze, well chosen though it seem, came to be abandoned by many theologians whose thought was disturbed by the great intellectual upheavals of the nineteenth century. A considerable number of writers who might be included among quondam disciples of Lotze have been progressively and irresistibly led on to complete denial of the rights of reason within the domain of religious truth. To credit theoretical cognition with no capacity to discover God, and to regard religious faith exclusively as a postulation of the practical side of our nature, are marks not only of the Ritschlian theology, but also of several recent endeavours in philosophy. The logical sequence of the stages in this modern breakdown of intellectualism does not at all points coincide with the chronological order of their appearance; consequently there is the less need for me to encumber this historical sketch with a tedious enumeration of the contributions of individual writers. Moreover, much of the voluminous literature of pragmatism, fideism and modernism will be so familiar to readers interested in current theology that it would be superfluous for me to do more than recall the final phases of this movement. As in the collapse of the scholastic ideal, so in the recent development of what has been called 'irrationalism,' insistence on practical rather than cognitive bases for faith has been supplemented by an extreme empiricism, restricting the scope of the philosophy of religion to psychology of individual religious experience and inductive investigation of the facts discovered by comparative study of religions. Finally this recent type of theology, contemplating the various departments of knowledge from which it pretends to have wholly detached the foundations of Christian doctrine and belief, claims to be unaffected by their possibly hostile findings. Whether the philosophy of nature issue in materialism, or not, is, we are told, indifferent to the Christian. The Nicene Creed may, in its ontology, outstrip the truth, the Ritschlian seems to imply; but Christ is equally the Son of God. The facts on which the Christian tradition is based may be undemonstrable or even false, some modernists affirm; yet the spiritually true ideas of Christianity abide unassailable. In such results this movement attains its climax; unless indeed there still remain a further stage of development, as yet only implicit, to constitute its final issue, and to complete to the bitter end the parallel which we have found thus far to subsist between the modern and the medieval quests for the relation of Christian faith to knowledge. Doubtless the Averroistic doctrine of the double truth' is repugnant to modern theologians of every school; but, prima facie at least, the contention that faith can afford to scorn alike the support and the conceivable hostility of knowledge seems perilously similar to the insincere paradox of decadent scholasticism. It may be a case of 'The little less, and what worlds away!'; but unless the new teaching can |